YouTube
12 May 2008
You can catch me on video on YouTube - there's a surreal thought! But first ...
This week is paperback publication in the UK - tomorrow, in fact. Not anywhere else though. That's just how publishing is. All sorts of countries - from Brazil to France, America to China - publish at different times of year - and sometimes years and years apart. At the same time as preparing to be in Bulgaria to talk about my last novel, Labyrinth, I am gearing up for UK press second time around for Sepulchre and the novel's next first publication in Norway!
Strangest of all, in these competitive times when readers could so easily be tempted to listen to music or go the movies or the theatre instead, is the latest sorts of publicity techniques being used.
For Sepulchre paperback publication, my UK publisher made a mini film specifically for YouTube. I know little about internet social networking sites, but have teenage children who occasionally ask me to look at strange and wonderful clips - such as sneezing pandas or a young man known to the world as 'Star Wars Kid' ...
For the promo for Sepulchre, we went into the woods near to my house in the UK. On a day of sharp, white, cold winter sunlight and the crack and snap of twigs and frozen leaves underfoot, I wandered around looking like the unseen extra in the Blair Witch Project. Later, we recorded a reading from Sepulchre. The result is something that is both entirely alien to me and extremely intriguing. The figure does not look like me, the voice does not sound like me, the landscape does not look like one that I know and love. It is, at the same time, utterly wonderful. Very much seeing the heart of Sepulchre interpreted by someone else and made real.
This, I suppose, is the nature of writing, of film making, of composition. To capture the integrity of the moment, the emotion and atmosphere that lies behind the character and plot and action.
Already, even though the mini movie has only been up on YouTube for a matter of hours, readers have been watching and responding ...
A bientôt au Sépulture
